The Encyclopedia of Information Systems provides essential answers to questions increasingly asked by people in all walks of life. People can no longer claim that information about computer viruses, for example, is unimportant to their work, or that advances in speech recognition and encryption will leave them unaffected. The Encyclopedia is therefore more useful than one might suspect to people well beyond the walls of information systems departments. Offering both general and technical information about major elements, issues, opinions, and key studies, as well as cross-references to related subjects, it captures the dynamic growth and complexity unique to our era. Key Features * Offers the only major encyclopedic examination of information systems; there are no competitors * Articles begin with easily understandable concepts and become increasingly sophisticated, satisfying the needs of all readers * Articles emphasize information that will not quickly go out of date * Each article contains an average of 8 graphs and 8 tables illustrating its important points * Contains approximately 220 separate articles, all original contributions commissioned for this work * Includes approximately 700 figures and tables within the text; more than 2,000 glossary entries explain key terms, "further reading" lists appear at the end of each entry, and an extensive cross-referencing system links related articles